The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [90]
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She found Tiny in the bed that was so much too wide and high for the little room under the roof of her sister’s cottage. Tiny was conscious, but drowsy. Virginia kissed her, feeling the familiar creased velvet of her skin, and held her dry, crooked hand for a time while the old woman talked quite sensibly, asking her why she was out so late, and whether she had had her dinner, and why she was so thin.
After a while, she mumbled herself into a doze. Virginia went downstairs. Hilda, the sister, was in the low front room, looking sceptically at a television set which Tiny had bought with her savings, although for a long time she had been too feeble to come downstairs and watch it.
‘She doesn’t seem so bad,’ Virginia said. ‘I thought she would be much more ill than this.’
‘Well, she rallies now and then, dear. Bother that thing!’ Hilda jumped up to turn off the television. She was even smaller than Tiny, but more active and wiry, her fingers always moving, her head constantly nodding, so that she had to have a little chain on her pince-nez to catch them when they slipped off her short nose. ‘I hate these clever plays. That B.B.C. will clever itself right out of existence one of these days. So Rosa talked to you? I thought she’d be able for it. She picked up quite a bit when I told her I’d sent the telegram. She knew you would come.’
‘Should you have told her? She ought not to know how bad she is.’
‘You don’t have to tell her. She knows all right. Bless you, Rosa’s not afraid of dying. She’s always asking the doctor how long she’s got, just as if she had a train to catch. It’s quite a joke between them.’
‘Is she really dying?’
Hilda raised her hands and let them plop on to her knees. ‘Who knows? Who can say when any one of us will go? Except our dear Lord Himself.’ She looked at the picture above the mantelpiece, a large and crudely-coloured painting of the Sacred Heart. ‘But the doctor told me this morning she hasn’t long to last. That’s why I sent for you. I knew you’d never forgive me if you didn’t see her before –’ For the first time, her small, tight face trembled, and Virginia knew how lonely she would be without the burden of an invalid sister to care for. Then she drew her mouth into a busy smile and said: ‘And nor would Rosa neither. She’d come back and tell me what she thought about it. When I told her this morning I was going to send the wire, she said: “You do that, Hilda. You get my Jinny here, and then you can send for Father O’Hagan. I’m not ready for him and his holy water until I’ve seen my Jinny.”’
When Virginia went upstairs again, bending her head to go into the bedroom, Tiny was still asleep. She lay propped on the pillows with her mouth open and her knees drawn up. Her small, humped figure did not reach more than half-way down the big bed, which had been Hilda’s marriage bed until her husband died.
The sheets were clean, the pillow-cases were beautifully embroidered, and a silk counterpane, laundered out of all colour, was spread over the blanket, with the corners precisely turned. Tiny herself looked as clean as a newly-bathed child, her frail skin luminous, her scalp showing pink through her soft white hair. The little room was fresh and neat, with the furniture polished and exactly in place on the bright rug, starched doileys under every ornament, and a stiff white runner under a row of photographs on the dressing-table.
There were photographs everywhere. What little wall space there was below the sloping ceiling was as closely covered with pictures as an Italian votive chapel. Helen as a schoolgirl, sharp-eyed and imperious; Helen’s parents, faded to sepia; Helen’s brother, who had died of pneumonia when he was a child; Helen’s wedding to Harold, with Helen in a low-waisted dress and corrugated hair, and Harold lean and grim.
There was a picture of the red-brick Chiswick house where Tiny had nursed Helen, and one of the ugly house on the hill, leaning at an odd angle against a dark sky,